UW geosciences ranks high in survey of published research

The UW scored very high in a survey of published geosciences research by Thomson Scientific, both in the number of times UW research was cited by other scientists and the average number of times a UW paper was cited.

Thomson Scientific’s “Essential Science Indicators” for geosciences, which sampled 224 scientific journals and more than 150,000 papers published from 1996 to early 2007, listed the UW sixth overall worldwide with 12,934 citations in other published research.

The total was exceeded only by the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the University of Colorado, the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The UW moved up to fifth in the rankings of citations per published paper. The average of 12.57 per paper was topped only by the University of New Hampshire, the national Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

The survey is the first that Thomson Scientific has conducted in geosciences in six years, and it is focused more narrowly on geology than the last survey. The UW’s geology and geophysics departments merged in 2001 to form a new department, Earth and space sciences. When the geosciences survey was broadened to include areas such as oceanography, atmospheric sciences and climatology, the UW also ranked fifth in papers published and cited.

The Thomson survey found Geophysical Research Letters, with more than 116,000 citations, to be the most-cited geological sciences journal, and Geology was a distant second with about 42,200 citations.